After the Future

Fear and Desire; Grace and Freedom

Last week I quoted Jackson Lear's Nation article about how new atheists like Sam Harris aren't just reductionist in their rejection of religion, but their embrace of an aggressive ideological positivism can be just as dangerous as any fanaticism that comes from the right.  Right-wing ideologues are more in the news these days, but I think an argument can be made that the Harrises and Kurzweils of the world are wittingly or unwittingly working for an alternative, transhuman future that is more ominous than anything envisioned in the feverish imaginations on the Right.

Atheists get things mixed up when they blame religion when the real problem is an unbalanced ideology, whether secular or religious in its style. Religious wars were the cause of absurd levels of violence and destruction in 17th century Europe, but the most massively destructive violence in Europe's recent history has been motivated by secular ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's purges were not motivated by religious zeal. Religious attitudes and behaviors can be a  part of an ideology, but insofar as a religion has a genuine faith dimension to it, that part of it cannot be contained within any ideology, and it usually works at cross purposes with fanatical ideological agendas.

The Judaeo-Christian Cosmogonic Myth

I think that one of the biggest problems with the contemporary West lies in its inability to  feel the sacred. And this lack of feeling makes it almost impossible to frame a plausible cosmology open to transcendence. We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to explain, and yet moderns feel silly if they discuss seriously ideas about the cosmos on terms different than those that Carl Sagan would approve of. And yet when we read about the cosmogonies of the ancients, we sense they were onto something that we have lost the capacity to appreciate. We want to retrieve it, but we are shy about it; we study these texts and other artifacts of premodern consciousness and talk about them in a kind of scholarly way so as not to let on that we think that maybe they knew something that we don't. But we dare not seriously their stories--safer to assume they are fanciful fictions.

Modern consciousness has squeezed out the mystery in things that naive premodern consciousness took for granted, and so, echoing Paul Ricoeur, I'd argue that we need to develop a new mindset that embraces a 'second naivete' that would once again be capable of experiencing what premoderns experienced and then tried to represent in their myths. The gospel tells us that unless we become like children, we cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. It does not mean to regress into childishness, but to open up the parts of the soul that we have closed down, the parts that are open to  the enchantment in Being, to be adults but to also the recover something lost. That's what I understand second naivete to be.

In what I write here I assume that human consciousness as it is currently structured cognizes in its ordinary states only a small fraction of the full spectrum of Being. Second naivete, therefore, is open to the idea of a supersensible, supra-rational realm that is wrapped around us and interpenetrates what we experience in ordinary sense-centered consciousness.  A second naivete is open to the idea that people in every generation have experiences in which clues, indicators, epiphanies are given concerning the existence of this supersensible, supra-rational realm. The difference between moderns and premoderns lies in that moderns think these people are crazy and premoderns thought they were shamans, initiates, or saints.

I think that the postmodern cultural paradigm that will arise in the coming decades will draw deeply from what the premoderns understood but which was rejected as incompatible with modern Enlightenment rationality. As we move further along into a globalizing world there is going to be enormous pressure for cultural fusion. One effect will be that as traditional societies absorb modern consciousness, modern societies will start once again to absorb elements of premodern consciousness. To take a fairly trivial example--look at how the martial arts of traditional Asia have come to dominate the action-movie genre. Some of this is nostalgia, but it doesn't have to be. Nostalgia is the desire to go native in the past, and that's not what I see going on there. It's rather that things moderns have filtered out are beginning to leak back in.  A very interesting book that  documents how this is happening all over the place is Erik Davis's Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.

I am very interested to watch developments within Tibetan Buddhism, because theirs is a living tradition has maintained a very powerful and vital link to the premodern while not seeming to be particularly threatened by the modern. Tibetan Buddhists know who they are, and they are interested to integrate what the West knows with what they know, and so it will be interesting to see if they become absorbed into modernity as Protestant Christianity has done, or whether they will absorb modernity and use what they absorb to further develop their tradition.

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The Mythos of Redemptive Violence vs. the Christian Chiastic Mythos

Myth provides the framework for any comprehension we have about moral truth--that's the way it was for the ancients, and that's the way it is for us. Mythos operates at a level deeper than what we call "belief systems", because belief systems are too rational, too open to comparison in a market of competing belief systems. Belief systems are profane ideologies even if they are religious, like Christian or Islamic fundamentalism. Myth, like poetry, uses language to represent what is incomprehensible in terms of our ordinary states of consciousness. It establishes some common ground with the familiar, but draws us into unfamiliar depths.

Myth thrives, therefore, only where there is the possibility to experience depth upon depth of sacred meaning, and fundamentalism and rationalism are terrified of depths because they lose control there. Mythos withers in the fluorescent glare of a hypertrophied rationality, and it suffocates in the oxygenless chambers of fundamentalism and dogmatism. For mythos to be mythos it has to deliver a sense of the sacred, a sense of the near presence of the gods, of angels, of the ancestors, of the beloved dead, and that we are all part of a cosmic web of relationships which is there for us to discover if we have any desire to understand what the meaning of our lives is. If we have any desire to understand what it means to live a good life, that is, to have some understanding about why what we do or fail to do matters, why our life adds up to something or fails to.

What we know is dwarfed by what we do not know. And yet whatever part of that ocean we have explored and have gotten to know is connected to the vastness that lies beyond it. And we can deduce some things about what the ocean is like elsewhere based on what we have learned about it locally, but such deductions are provisional at best. How the ocean works near the surface is quite different from how it works in its deepest depths, and what might be true about its laws here could be very different from its laws there. And yet there is a continuum that connects there with here.

Spiritual Zombies

So, who or what is the “true object” of the anger welling up from the American body politic in the late summer of 2010? What “untouchable” figure or force is responsible for our dire predicament?  My answer would be similar to that offered by G.K. Chesterton when the Times of London sponsored an essay contest on the question, “What is wrong with the world?” Chesterton’s brief, two-word essay read simply, “I am.”

We are.

The United States is now a zombie nation not because of something that Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, or the poor have done, but because it is filled with 310 million zombies, spiritual corpses who give the appearance of life, but are filled with “dead men’s bones and every kind of impurity.”

This is the most disconcerting answer of them all, and the real reason why the “true object of [our] anger is untouchable.” In our pride and sinfulness we spurn the truth about ourselves and our country. As a result, the one thing we refuse to do at all costs is examine ourselves, each of us, and question our contributions to the disintegration we see around us. That was true in the bellum omnium contra omnes – the war of all against all - in primitive societies, and it is true today. And yet we – all of us – are the source of our present discontent and the collapse that may be upon us. . . .

No, the solution to our problems can be found in one word: conversion.

 Mark Gordon (h/t Mike McG)

A different, more expanded understanding of spiritual zombie-ism as I have talked about it here, but apt. Our zombie-ness is indeed our normal condition, and it's precisely from it that we all need to be saved.

The Freedom Paradox

In contemporary Libertarian America, freedom is a question mainly of multiplying choices, the more the better. Freedom is a question of being unshackled from any restriction. Liberation is understood as the unrestricted pursuit of any compulsion, so long as it does not harm others. From the Christian point of view, nothing could be cruder or more destructive to the life of the soul. 

I think that freedom is best understood as a paradox. We human beings are actors improvising on a stage where the possibilities truly are infinite, but as one makes concrete choices, other possibilities are grayed out; they become unavailable. So the very exercise of freedom involves a quantitative reduction of possibilities, and yet it's only by the movement out of possibility into actuality that we become truly free.  Our free acts require that we become the prisoner of our choices. But restriction on the horizontal dimension of our lives creates the possibility for expansion on the vertical dimension, the dimension of grace and spiritual freedom.

Superpowers: Invisibility vs. Flight

In this week's This American Life the theme is superpowers, and in Act One The Daily Show's John Hodgeman asks which superpower, if only one were possible, would we choose--Invisibility or Flight. The answers given by people he interviewed were, I thought, rather depressing.

One person talked about how she would choose Invisibility so that she could steal sweaters from Brooks Brothers, and another about how he would choose it so he could watch different beautiful women taking showers--but then changed his mind because he knew that was unacceptable. In the end he would choose Flight to prevent himself from using Invisibility as a Peeping Tom. He would not be able to control himself if he had Invisibility. Another person speculated that most people would choose Flight, but that they would be lying because they don't want to admit to all the sneaky ways they would use Invisibility. It's interesting how sneaky people assume everyone else is.

The Historical Norm

I think that one of the key differences that distinguish Americans on the right from moderates and liberals lies in that the mentality of the right is closer to the way most people throughout history have thought. They think tribally, and they believe that it's either kill or be killed, that either you're with us or you're against us.

It's a mentality that seems primitive and reactionary to the educated, cosmopolitan mind, but it's an attitude that throughout most of history made practical sense. Because most of history is the story of gang warfare, of warlords, and violent turf battles, sometimes on a small scale sometime on a global scale, but it always boils down to the same fundamental impulse: We need to kill them before they kill us. For most people in the history of the world, that wasn't paranoid thinking, it was realistic thinking. The difference now between the right and Liberals is that Liberals believe we have evolved past that kind of barbarism and people on the right think we haven't.

Glenn Beck's Day

After receiving the key, Beck spoke for about an hour, reminiscing about growing up in Mount Vernon, which he described as a "magical place," connected to the values of small-town America.

"I believe in Norman Rockwell's America," he said. . . .

Beck said he didn't remember politics being divisive growing up, and that if people now could just stop "tearing each other apart" there was a bright future for the country. 

(The Seattle Times in a story about Beck's being given the key to the city in Mount Vernon, the town where he grew up  about sixty miles north of Seattle.)

Probably enough has been written about Glenn Beck to make unnecessary anything more I have to say about him.  And I don't know that I have anything to add to the subject that I have not already written on my many posts about "Zombie Traditionalism" and "Lot's Wife Syndrome", but I just find the right-wing mentality oddly fascinating. 

It's not enough to simply dismiss it as irrational, because all the important things that give life meaning are irrational. The trick is to discern whether they are sub-rational (instinct driven, fear and greed) or super-rational (grace-inspired--compassion, understanding, idealism) and then to respond appropriately.  My "hypothesis" is that the irrationality of the right wing is sub-rational while presenting itself as super-rational, and that's always when trouble starts: It's the archetypal problem of the devil quoting scripture.L

I've written before about the main difference between the Left and the Right lying in its orientation toward time--the Right oriented toward the past; the Left toward the future.  It's suggested in the names we give each, conservative and progressive. I've also written about how all premodern societies are predominantly past oriented, and modern societies are predominantly future oriented. And I've argued that modernity came to the west because of the unique Jewish-Christian validation given to history as meaningful, as the stage upon which a cosmic, future-oriented, promise-centered salvation drama is played out. The essence of the Judeo-Christian orientation toward history is Abrahamic, on the move, trusting in the promise of an impossible future, rather than clinging to the securities of the past. Progressivism as it emerged in the 19th Century depends for its inspiration on Hegelian and Marxist eschatology which in turn would be impossible without the Jewish-Christian mythos in the background.